1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer peripheral technology, and more particularly, to a hot-pluggable peripheral input device coupling system, which is designed for use to couple one or more peripheral input devices, such as a keyboard and a mouse that are connected together to a PS/2 connector, to a network server platform, such as a blade server, for the purpose of allowing the user to input data and commands to the blade server via the keyboard and the mouse.
2. Description of Related Art
Blade server is a clustering type of network server, which is characterized by the use of a circuit board enclosure to integrate a cluster of server modules (commonly called “blades”), with all of these server modules providing the same server functionality. In other words, a blade server can respond to a client's request by linking any one of the clustered server modules to the client. In practice, each server module is embodied as a single circuit board (i.e., blade), which can be easily fitted to the blade server's enclosure to increase the blade server's client serving capacity.
A computer platform is typically equipped with a dedicated set of peripheral input devices, such as keyboard and mouse, which allow the user to input data and commands to the computer platform to perform such tasks as system updates, file maintenance, hardware/software testing, and so on. In network applications, blade servers are used as Web servers, file servers, E-mail servers, and so on. In such applications, since peripheral input devices are required only in the setup stage and are unnecessary during the server operation, keyboard and mouse are typically removed to save equipment cost and room space. For this sake, blade servers are typically unequipped with keyboard and mouse during operation, and keyboard and mouse are externally coupled to blade servers only when it is necessary to perform system updates, file maintenance, or hardware/software testing on the blade servers.
One drawback to conventional keyboard/mouse coupling systems on blade servers, however, is that each system is provided with only one management control module, and therefore in the event of a failure to the management control module, it would cause the keyboard and mouse unable to be functionally linked to the blade server. Moreover, conventional keyboard/mouse coupling systems for blade servers typically have no hot-plug capabilities, and therefore are inconvenient to use.